Big TV networks with crews in Haiti appear all to have arrived with on-staff doctor-reporters. These talking-head, but real, MDs have for the most part provided desperately needed medical care while also reporting on the urgent public health story in the wake of the earthquake.

But is being a doctor for awhile, and a reporter for awhile, the same as being a reporter while treating the injured and sick? Some call it the Gupta effect, we learn, as several MD-journalists are more or less doing what the CNN reporter has from the start. And, one must say, Gupta got a good and gripping piece of fresh news. He reported first hand after dark from a makeshift clinic where he and his production crew were staying through the night. Other  outsider physicians had repaired to the safety of a guarded compound. That left post-surgical patients and others in bad shape to more or less fend for themselves – along with Gupta doing his best.

I saw one of Gupta’s dispatches from the clinic, but learned the rest from a fine wrap-up at Columbia Journalism Review’s Observatory blog, by Curtis Brainard . He has links to many other reports and analyses of this blurring of participatory good deeds and objective news gathering. He is sympathetic broadly to network decisions to let their doctors be doctors and reporters too. The issue raised is potential distortion of coverage should a network broadcast, first person, its physician’s routine work that is not particularly newsy in itself  rather than exercise disinterested judgment on what news is most informative to the audience.

Good stuff to chew on. Some TV docs, it appears, provided emergency health care with no video camera or producer crowding close. They also, separately  found time to go talk to other health providers and emergency teams for stand-alone reports not dependent for their punch on the correspondent’s own healing labors.That seems the preferable way to do it. If a broadcaster’s doc saves a few lives, one thinks that the network should strive to have another reporter do the stand-up or voice over – and interview and watch additional, non-TV docs.

Related News:

• TV Guide – Joyce Eng: TV Medical Correspondents Juggle Dueling Obligations in Haiti.

Pic – screenshot. Source ABC News;

- Charlie Petit

Admittedly, it’s a little late to weigh in with top 2009 lists. But a few days ago, Mark Katches, a blogger for California Watch–an online project of the Center for Investigative Reporting–wrote about the responses he got when he asked some top investigative journalists what they thought were the best investigative pieces of 2009.

What astonished me about their picks was how many of them were what we’d call science stories. Here are the stories that Katches says got multiple mentions in his informal survey:

• The Washington Post’s “Wasting Away” series on AIDS funding abuses and lack of oversight, by Debbie Cenziper.
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s “Cashing in on Kids” series on rampant fraud and other abuses within Wisconsin’s taxpayer subsidized child-care system, by Raquel Rutledge.
• USA Today’s series on school lunch safety that found lower standards for food served in school cafeteries, written by Blake Morrison, Peter Eisler and Anthony DeBarros.
• ProPublica and The Los Angeles Times “When Caregivers Harm” fro ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times, about deficiencies in California’s system for disciplining nurses, written by Tracy Weber and Charles Ornstein.
• The Chicago Tribune’s “Clout Goes to College” exposed how hundreds of students with subpar academic performance were getting accepted into the University of Illinois because they were well connected, written by Tara Malone, Stacy St. Clair and Jodi S. Cohen.
• The Washington Post’s coverage of a fatal Metro crash, which found that it was not as accidental as officials had claimed, and that it might have been prevented. It was written by Joe Stephens and Lena H. Sun.

With the exception of the piece on kids getting into college because the fix was in, these could all arguably be called science stories. AIDS funding, child care, food standards, nurses’ behavior, and accident prevention are all subjects that could fall within our beat.

Katches mentions other good investigative stories from 2009, and many of them were science stories, too.

Yet none of these stories was written by any of the names familiar to us in science writing, with the exception of Charles Ornstein. I’ve always thought of investigative reporting–however we might disagree about what that means–to be among the highest callings in journalism. Most of us, by now, can write a clear spot news piece or blog post about a journal article or a presentation at a science meeting. And that’s a fine occupation–I’ve spent most of my career doing that.

But why aren’t we writing the investigative pieces? With the background that science writers bring to their stories, they are more qualified than many other reporters to look into abuses and failings of government and other health care agencies.

I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m sorry to see it. We’re missing an opportunity here.

- Paul Raeburn

AAAS Science Magazine news writer Richard Kerr sprung loose a couple of PDFs of his coverage last month from the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. It includes not only a quality of writing and reporting that we expect from him, but mostly stories that didn’t make the wider media at all. Here there are, page 1 and page 2.

Pretty good stuff. I liked particularly his tidbit on the training that – despite failure to get a specific warning out in time – saved a schoolful of children from the tsunami in Samoa. The detail on the unpinned Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica is vivid, too. The tsunami news got some coverage elsewhere but not, he tells us, the rest of it.

- Charlie Petit

A University of South Florida team published this week what may be the first sign at the scale of an entire ocean basin that sea water acidity is measurably increasing due to higher levels of carbon dioxide. And almost nobody wrote it up.

The exception in view to the Tracker and among traditional media is the Seattle Times, where Sandi Doughton got it in Wednesday’s edition. The news, from a team at the University of South Florida with participation by Seattle-area scientists, has its results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Data are from water samples gathered (including from the vessel pictured, UWash’s R/V Thomas G. Thompson) from waters between Hawaii and Alaska in 1991 and again three years ago. They report finding that, when the logarithmic pH scale is converted to a linear measure, acidity in the top 300 feet of ocean has risen about 6 percent.

Doughton puts the measurements in context with local changes in acidity in the Pacific Northwest, and speculation that if it goes on, many marine ecosystems such as coral reefs and plankton populations could be radically changed.

Deepest waters, they report, appear not to have changed – a confirmation that the shift is most likely due to chemical changes arising from interaction with the atmosphere. Chances seem high we will be reading a good deal more about this and similar studies.

Grist for the Mill: Univ. S. Florida Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The German Tracker was a bit distracted from blogging, because he had a week of talks about the Tracker, quality in science journalism, and ways to keep or (even better) improve it.

After a month or so of tracking science journalism in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, I think it is time now to make clear, what the goal of this venture is and is not. First of all, the comments here (even the harsh ones) are NOT meant to be personal criticism of individual journalists at all. This is important, as all of us know, that the budgets differ greatly between newspapers and magazines, online or public broadcast editorial boards. It’s obvious, that it makes a difference, whether you had an hour or a week or a month to prepare your piece. And no critic can see behind the curtains.

Thus, any time the Tracker reviews and offers his opinion about an article, it is meant to be a reminder for the responsible editors, editorial boards or chief editors to fight for a sustainable environment to keep and improve the high standards of science journalism in the German language media. I prefer to hint to good examples, new and astonishing ways of high-quality science reporting. But from time to time criticism seems to be necessary, because we should not just shrug and accept, that we watchdogs can’t bark properly due to the rationalization of air in editorial boards. The audience out there usually cannot easily tell the difference between good and bad barking, especially if the topic involves complicated science.

Not a single science journalist should be quiet about a development, where journalists get less and less time (say: money) to do research, to check quotes, to actually search for new, untold, not “press-released” stories, and, most importantly, judge facts for the public. Especially the judging (show the public, what is scientifically sound and what is not, e.g.) is, what makes journalism valuable (and journalists indispensable), because it helps the reader to find a way through the ever rising amounts of available information. Thus, “peer review within science journalism”, the theme of the Tracker, is in the interest of every single science journalist.

A special goal of the German Knight Science Journalism Tracker is, of course, to provide an (admittedly small) window into the German Language science journalism craft, so that an international audience will get an idea, how the Germans, Austrians and Swiss report about international and local science news.

Last not least, I would appreciate hints to articles (either high or low quality, but online available, please), especially from local/smaller newspapers, as it is obviously impossible for a single Tracker to screen “all that was fit to print” on a single day in German language media.

- Sascha Karberg (back on track next week)

Haven’t seen this much live video tension from a dark and dank place in, oh, maybe a quarter of a century. That’s how long since Geraldo Rivera’s dramatic opening of Al Capone’s secret vault. One hopes Lily the black bear, either delivering right now or about to deliver a cub or more in her den under a log, has a more rewarding result. The news is that a conservation organization, the North American Bear Center, has put an infrared camera and light source in the den near Ely, Minn, exact location secret, and streamed the images on the internet. Here they are at ESPN (actual site looks overwhelmed for the moment).

Other outlets are keeping up, too. One, the Duluth News Tribune via reporter John Myers, reports a birth! This ursine even has a Facebook Page full of tweet-sized remarks from viewers.

The AP ran a brief on this yesterday. Seth Borenstein wrote it and reported this morning shortly before the clear evidence of at least one cub, “now I can’t stop watching it … it’s true engagement of science and the public.” Indeed. One expects it will get plenty of standard media coverage, but for much of the public the news is flowing raw and unfiltered via den cam and comments from researchers in conversation with one another and with viewers all over. Pretty amazing.

Grist for the Mill: North American Bear Center

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Mexican business leader Carlos Slim announced this week a $65M investment in partnership with the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute. It will launch a three year research project in genomic medicine to understand the hereditary aspects of cancer  worldwide and of type 2 diabetes in Mexico and Latin America. The announcement received broad coverage in Mexico and some Latin-American newspapers, but apparently missing are in depth stories exploring the scientific side of it. There is still time to do them. Also in Mexico, many journals today report that over the last 7 years obesity among children 5 to 11 has increased 77%.

A mediados de semana los periódicos mexicanos recogía la buena noticia que el magnate Carlos Slim donaba 65 millones de dólares a un proyecto que estudiará las bases genéticas del cáncer, de la diabetes 2 en población mexicana, y algunos aspectos de la insuficiencia renal. Estará dirigido desde el prestigioso Broad Institute de Boston, en asociación con el Instituto Nacional de Genómica de México. La noticia ha tenido mucha difusión, pero no se ha profundizado todavía en los detalles más científicos del proyecto. Sería una buena oportunidad para aprovechar el gancho y preparar reportajes sobre genética; un tema que se encuentra en un momento apasionante. Ruth Rodríguez en El Universal , Milenio, o Luis Alberto Medina en Diario de Yucatán presentan la información de manera bastante básica. En Excelsior, Verónica Mondragón titula un ligeramente equívoco “Inician otro mapeo mexicano”. La Jornada profundiza un poco más con una nota más completa de Roberto Carlos Amador, y Laura Poy aprovecha para sacar una información sobre factores genéticos relacionados con comer en exceso desarrollada por científicos mexicanos. Bien logrado. La noticia también se recoge en El Espectador (Colombia): “El proyecto genético de Slim“, El Mercurio (Chile), y otros periódicos en Latinoamérica. BBC Mundo saca una extensa nota, y no hemos observado repercusión en periódicos españoles.

De nuevo, hay cancha para buenos reportajes respondiendo qué hace al perfil genético del cáncer ser diferente en Latinoamérica que en otros países, el equilibrio entre componente genético y ambiental en la diabetes tipo 2, en qué se centran las disparidades existentes entre diferentes poblaciones, y muchos otros aspectos que envuelven a la prometedora investigación en genómica.

Sin salir de México, hoy mismo varios medios reportan que en siete años la obesidad entre niños de 5 a 11 años ha crecido un 77% (Elisabeth Velasco, La Jornada). Preocupante dato, el cual no deberíamos esperar que solucione la genética.

- Pere Estupinyà

A major review and new analysis of data going back decades by researchers on contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports this week in Nature the most definitive examination yet of air pollution – namely ozone – blowing all the way across the Pacific Ocean from Asia and into the US. This is important as an instructive demonstration that not just CO2, but many air pollutants, have worldwide reach. The new paper establishes for the first time a clear correlation between specific smog measures here and the influx from overseas. But also important for assessing the performance of media on the story is that the fact of ozone and other waste gases and grit wafting from the Far East (but coming at us Yanks from beyond our Far West)  has been well documented for quite a while.

Why do so many reporters (one good exception noted below) imply by their phrasing that this arrival here of air pollution from Asia is a new discovery? The journal report’s footnotes make clear its long history. Veterans at covering air pollution and global change know that, for years, stations at places like Trinidad Head up on California far north coast have been picking up extras from industry in China, Korea, Japan, and their neighbors and carried by remnants of what once was known as the Asian Brown Cloud as it disperses across the sea. I know news stories have picked this up before, too (I wrote one in 2003 and it wasn’t any scoop back then). I couldn’t quickly find a news story sample still on line – maybe someone will send me a few links -  but did find a 2004 paper, here.It is one example of how routinely this established, underlying fact has circulated in regulatory and scientific circles.

The news is the solid link between the already-known arrival of foreign ozone and the officially reported figures on smog over time. The story is just as gripping if told as an important advance in a well-established line of inquiry.

Stories:

• AP – Jeff Barnard: Study: Asian smog discovered above Western USA ;
• Portland Oregonian (two stories) - Scott Learn: Asian pollution may boost West Coast smog, researchers say ; Matthew Preusch : Study: Pollutants from Asia ending up over western US.
• Canwest News (via Vancouver Sun) Margart Munro: Blame Asia for some of North America’s growing ozone pollution: study. Nice job overall. She writes of “long speculation that offshore pollution is contributing to western North America’s ozone, but this is the first study to provide evidence.” Best evidence so far perhaps, but is it the first evidence, period?
• LA Times – Margot Roosevelt: Winds carry Asian smog component to Western US, study finds ; Again makes it appear this is all new – but also does a fine job explaining the new precision in the measurements and the paradox in recent years of urban western smog going down while, out in the countryside with its cleaner air, it was going up. Out there, the Asian fraction had, it says here, an impact big enough to reverse the local trend.
• Calcutta Daily Telegraph – G. S. Mudur: America pollution cloud on India ;
• New Scientist – America ‘imports’ pollution from Asia ;
• Boulder Daily Camera (Colo) Joe Rubino: CU study: Asia causes U.S. ozone increases ;
• Hey looky here:   Discovery News – John D. Cox: Breathing Asia’s Fumes ; It is little surprise that this veteran weather and climate journalist gets it right: “While scientists have recognized this phenomenon for some time, they are just now beginning to put some hard numbers on it.”

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A week ago the Anchorage Daily News‘s Elizabeth Bluemink reported that a multinational firm and Alaska Native corporations are working on a big fiberoptic project to lay cable through an ever less-hostile Arctic. The route, potentially open within four years, would  connect East Asia  to Europe via the UK. Today the story is getting a bigger push by the Associated Press, where in a story filed yesterday Dan Joling re-reports the news and gives it a different feel.

One imagines that plenty of large capital movements are in the works to take commerce into the Arctic Ocean if, as expected, its summer ice continues to ebb. Arctic  nations’ coast guards and other security services already are beefing up their abilities to patrol the widening waters. A submarine cable seems an ideal fit to start cashing in – summer workers can install it and once it is safely draped on the seabed ice packs of the long dark winter won’t bother it.

The two stories have interesting contrasts. The state’s biggest newspaper dwells on the local angle. The new com backbone would bring superior links within Alaska, with side-branches taking broadband to communities that now must rely on balkier microwave relays or satellite bands.

Joling’s story for the wire looks harder at the big picture and its context in climate change.

Bluemink reports that this route near the pole would reduce signal transmission times by 50 percent compared to present cable routes and land lines across Eurasia. She doesn’t give the numbers. Joling does: Even with boosters and circuitry to navigate, these are signals traveling at the speed of light in glass (whatever that is), which is lickity split. To get one’s ones and zeros from the UK to Japan now takes 140 milliseconds. The more direct route takes it down to 88 milliseconds, the man at the Kodia-Kenai Cable Co. tells him. His example answer to who cares? In the trading world of high finance, milliseconds count when placing puts, sells, buys, and other transactions in play.

(Editorial aside by an economics naif: Wow, is this what it’s for – to help self-styled “bankers” bleed more capital from the jitters and twitches of the market and into their absurd annual bonuses? I’d love to hear from a few economists whether such faster microtrading adds much or anything to the broader historic societal merits of such exchanges: to optimize productivity and prosperity by moving capital from relatively loser sectors and companies to ones that are growing and providing returns from real businesses and labor.)

Both stories are interesting. They also leave plenty of room for tech, financial, and enviro reporters to fill in the blanks (Joling’s does not even mention that this is a fiberoptic cable – which people in the biz know it must be but ought to be stated explicitly). Other questions include the potential impacts of the cable-laying process, and the equipment it takes to do this job. But the most important revolve around the route and the prospect that many more such cables might be in the offing. Look at that useful map  that the Daily News ran. Maybe it makes sense to start with a cable that hugs the Arctic Coast as much as possible – but the shortest route of all would go straight from the Bering Strait, or perhaps from Barrow, right across the middle of the Arctic Ocean, skirt the north rather than south side of Greenland, then perhaps go through Svalbard and south to the UK and Europe.Or, perhaps better, to Norway and into the heart of Europe.

How many more milliseconds would that yield?

Other Stories:

• Kodiak Daily Mirror (Jan 14): Fiber optic cable to connect Asia and Europe ;
• TMCNet (trade press, Jan 14) Marisa Terriori: Kodiak-Kenai Cable Company Kicks Off Undersea Arctic Fiber Optic Project ;

- Charlie Petit

Want to see more of this scene on Mars? One is quite sure a digital imaging sleuth working for NASA cranked up those blue tones far beyond the bounds of reality, but still, pretty nice. In today’s Arizona Star reporter Otto Ross tells readers that at the University of Arizona the operators of the HiRise camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter want to get the advice of planetary photography fans among the public as they draw up their list of targets for closer scrutiny.

Nice story with a legitimate topic. It has however an underlying twist in its assignment that is not fully explained. Writer Ross, an end-note tells us, is a “NASA space grant intern.” What is that? A possible clue may be here, but I see nothing about media internships.   Newspapers these days need a lot of help maintaining staff size as ad revenues stay in the tank. Desperation fuels inspiration. The business is changing fast. I have no reason to conclude that Mr. Ross did anything but an honest job here – but do wonder about a NASA program that, from the looks of this instance, puts people on media staffs where they are reporting about other programs by NASA and its contractors. Just questions. The answers may be interesting.

Grist for the Mill: U of Ariz Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Nature today carries a report on asteroids that drew few nibbles from major media, but is getting a ride from smaller, mostly on line outlets.

The news is that a well-known planetary scientist at MIT and his team have a reason why, while most asteroids have picked up a slight red tint due to bombardment by cosmic rays and other space weathering, the sub-population of those that pass close to Earth are mostly gray. They figure that tidal forces from close encounters regular stir their surface layers, bringing rawer, grayer stuff to the top. And that, in turn, suggests these space rocks are not so much giant boulders as congregations of gravel.

The biggest outlet in view that picked this up is BBC, where Victoria Gill says the research “solves the mystery” of why the meteorites that land on the Earth often do not match the color of asteroids in space. Actually, one is uncertain that this disparity was the mystery. Rather, it appears, the puzzle has been  why a few asteroids DO match the color of meteorites – derived almost surely from inside asteroids that got somehow shattered. Her story gets around to putting the whole research sequence together, including its conclusion that many asteroids are heavily jointed and fractured, easily-roiled things, and that ones that pass close to Earth regularly are often gray as they have been thus stirred or shaken by tidal disturbances.

Other stories:

• New Scientist – Stephen Battersby: Approaching Earth makes asteroids go pale ; He includes word that the oft-discussed passage of asteroid Apophis in 2029 near (but not into) Earth offers a chance to watch the resurfacing process occur.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Earth Causes Asteroids To Shake, Rattle, and Roll ; She writes that the finding may help scientists deflect an Earth-bound asteroid. How exactly? Gravity tugs would work as well with well-cemented ones. And gravel might be harder to move with reaction motors mounted on them. Knowing the challenge certainly helps one plan how to meet it, but this leaves one hanging as to how.
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Phil Berardelli: Earth Can Shake Up Asteroids, Too ; Solid, logical walk through the research findings.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Asteroids Get a Surface Makeover When They Pass Near Earth.
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Earth Causes Asteroid-Quakes ;
• *UPDATE: USA Today (blog) Dan Vergano: Earth causes quakes on nearby asteroids;

Grist for the Mill: MIT Press Release;

Pic: Asteroid Ida, nicely pinkish. Duped from AAAS ScienceNow story.

- Charlie Petit

Hoo boy, some stories look so shaky that one is inclined just to turn the page – as many readers probably did not do upon encountering in last weekend’s Sunday Times this under John Harlow‘s byline: Blonde women born to be warrior princesses. Maybe it’s possible, but….

The article cites a study and quotes a California professor. It got a tiny bit of buzz. I could go into it further but a more efficient tack is merely to refer to a blog called Neuroworld where its operator, freelance writer  Ryan Sager, does a persuasive job of dismantling the thing. He calls his post Science Reporting Gone Wild. Well put.

(Thanks to Jim Handman from CBC’s Quirks and Quarks for spotting this take-down.)

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit